Over the last few years, the development of web applications such as social networks and messaging services has lead to an important increase of information that needs to be continuously updated and transmitted to the users of such services.
Such web applications can be accessed in a plurality of ways by the user, for example using electronic or communication devices such as a mobile device (e.g. a Smartphone), a personal computer, a tablet or a laptop. To this end, such communication devices are adapted to run a plurality of such web applications that give an access to different services such as social networks or messaging services, such as Gmail™, Facebook™, Twitter™, Hotmail™, etc. Other web applications may comprise news and location applications for instance.
When a data update is made available on one of these services, such as a new message or an invitation to an event, a new notification is received on the electronic device of the user and displayed to his attention, for instance on the device screen.
As most users now have several devices, it may prove cumbersome to keep up with all notifications issued by the user's several devices.
To avoid multiplicity of electronic devices for a same user, employees at many enterprises are now allowed to use their personal phones for business purposes. Such electronic devices can run different instances, each accessible through an authentication process for instance. This may be implemented e.g. through the use of several virtual machines or partitioning of the device. In the following description, each identity of a user (personal or consumer, corporate, etc.) will be referred also as a persona or mode.
With such multiple persona enabled devices, a user can connect with his personal electronic device to corporate data and resources as well as use corporate applications, which can cause security issues. Alternatively, a user can connect to his personal data using his corporate electronic device.
There is a variety of commercially available solutions to this problem such as effectively creating an absolute firewall between the employee's personal data and applications and the company's sensitive data and applications for a same device.
A pitfall of such strong segregation between the different personas is the handling of notifications. Indeed, if the employee is using his mobile device in a consumer mode (the active persona), he will not be notified of corporate events or conditions unless he switches into that corporate mode. The same is true in the reverse case (i.e.: a user is using his/her mobile device in the corporate mode which means the user will not be proactively notified of consumer specific events).
As the focus is on the separation of the modes for a same device, the user will miss notifications he would have received if he had kept several electronic devices.
Alternatively, other existing solutions present the opposite problem, i.e. the different personas will expose all notifications regardless of what persona is active. In other words, no segregation is implemented between the personas. Say a user has a social network activity with content not suitable for work (NSFW), he may not be happy about receiving notifications from his (private) social network activity while in the corporate persona reviewing a presentation with colleagues. Conversely, when in the personal mode, an employee may not want to see some sensitive corporate information show up on his display through corporate notifications.
Today there is a need that allows a user to keep track of notifications for multiple personas enabled electronic devices. There is a further need for a solution that is not counterproductive with the needed separation of the persona.